The Ode Heard Round the World

With the release last spring of a phenomenally popular iPad app, an exhibition at the Morgan Library & Museum of the original manuscript, and now the documentary “Following the Ninth: In the Footsteps of Beethoven’s Final Symphony,” the Ninth seems to be having a cultural moment. Of course, that’s not quite right: Since its premiere in 1824, it has never truly left the spotlight.

Beethoven capped his last and greatest symphony with a grand chorale finale, a stirring setting of Schiller’s “Ode to Joy.” One of the earliest artists to recognize the personal as political in a time of repression, Beethoven was seen as offering a universal prayer — “All men will be brothers” — that was both hopeful prophecy and liberation battle cry.

Directed by Kerry Candaele, the film touches only lightly on the Ninth’s ethereal qualities, instead examining its potent legacy as anthem: Chilean demonstrators who sang the Ode during the Pinochet dictatorship, a Chinese student organizer who broadcast it at Tiananmen Square, an East Berliner who heard the concert conducted by Leonard Bernstein after the Wall was dismantled. Attention is also paid to Japan’s loving devotion to the Ninth, known as Daiku, which is sung in hundreds of concerts around the country every December.

It’s a lot of ground to cover, and adding even a brief discussion of the repression Beethoven saw rising in Europe would have lent invaluable context. But “Following the Ninth” rotates easily among its interviewees’ accounts about what the Ninth meant to them. It’s thrilling to see footage of a chorus of Chilean protesters singing outside a torture prison and a former inmate recall the inspiration it gave him in a time of despair, how “it was hope” he heard. Newsreel clips from Beijing and Berlin; watching Daiku societies prepare for a rendition of the Ninth after the devastation of the 2011 tsunami — all the film’s segments are smartly assembled and gracefully paced. Oh, and the score’s pretty good, too.